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Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985
A fierce critical intelligence animates every page of Queer Street. Its sentences are dizzying divagations. The postwar generation of queer New York has found a sophisticated bard singing 'the elders' history' (The New York Times). James McCourt's seminal Queer Street has proven unrivaled in its ability to capture the voices of a mad, bygone era. Beginning with the influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York and barreling through four decades of crisis and triumph up to the era of the floodtide of AIDS, McCourt positions his own exhilarating experience against the whirlwind history of the era. The result is a commanding and persuasive interlocking of personal, intellectual, and social history that will be read, dissected, and honored as the masterpiece it is for decades to come. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2003; a Lambda Award finalist.
592 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2003
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366 people want to read
About the author
James McCourt
18 books25 followersJames McCourt was born in 1941.
McCourt was raised in New York City and educated at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School and Manhattan College, when it was considered the Irish-American Harvard. McCourt briefly studied acting at the Yale School of Drama, but left with fellow student Vincent Virga in 1964 to go to London, to experience the exploding theater scene there. McCourt and Virga have been a couple ever since then. They stayed in London for two periods, from 1964 to 1967, and 1969 to 1971, resettling in New York City.
After McCourt’s story was published in the New American Review, the legendary writer and social commentator Susan Sontag helped McCourt find a publisher. In 1975, McCourt published the expanded “Mawrdew Czgowchwz” in book form. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times called the book “A gloriously flamboyant debut. Take it in spoonfuls and you'll find passages to fall in love with. Sooner or later, you may even find yourself reading them aloud to your friends.”
McCourt was raised in New York City and educated at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School and Manhattan College, when it was considered the Irish-American Harvard. McCourt briefly studied acting at the Yale School of Drama, but left with fellow student Vincent Virga in 1964 to go to London, to experience the exploding theater scene there. McCourt and Virga have been a couple ever since then. They stayed in London for two periods, from 1964 to 1967, and 1969 to 1971, resettling in New York City.
After McCourt’s story was published in the New American Review, the legendary writer and social commentator Susan Sontag helped McCourt find a publisher. In 1975, McCourt published the expanded “Mawrdew Czgowchwz” in book form. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times called the book “A gloriously flamboyant debut. Take it in spoonfuls and you'll find passages to fall in love with. Sooner or later, you may even find yourself reading them aloud to your friends.”
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
September 6, 2015
I initially presumed and was drawn to this being a kind of latter years "Gay New York" (George Chauncey), and while almost entirely focused on New York, with chapter jaunts to London and Los Angeles, "Queer Street" is a brother of a very different mother (while remaining kissing cousin). No straight history, however gaily forward, this. I was also very drawn to the latter date in the subtitle, the date of my own out coming, but this effulgent outpouring is in no way contained by the vintage on the bottle. There is a third title, "Excursions in the Mind of the Life" that is more fittingly descriptive of the winding street this opus queers. This volume is nothing if not excursive; it opens onto a veritable miscellany out of the author's wandering mind (Aladdin's cave and Oz), a brick road paved with yellow diamonds, with facets of history, memoir, lists, wit, criticism, discourse and dialogue that glitter and fascinate and occasionally give one a headache. I'd say I "got" only about two thirds of the thing, wandering off into poppy fields now and then, looking forlornly for a wiz of an editor. I have to say too, however, that some of the constructed/overheard dialogue at the Old Met Opera's standing-room-only line and the scribbles on the wall or comments heard over the partition of the Everard Baths are worth the price of admission alone, not to mention the interview with Bette Davis (entirely mention-worthy). Happy to have clicked my heels together as I turned the last page but this will remain an important reference world to return to (we mustn't forget our history dahlings!) because so much and so many are there to be found ("But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you and you and you...and you were there.").
March 22, 2019
It was interesting but the whole thing is written in quotation snippets of past conversations, archaic queer speak and all. It was difficult to keep track of the time frame as referenced conversations seemed to jump around over the course of four decades.
January 30, 2020
Colour me stupid, but the allegedly intellectual and witty value of this book went completely over my head. There is something to be said for a more logically organised narrative, which this book could use.
Perhaps there is a great value to is, however the style has buried it deep under the ghastly storytelling and has hidden it from me...
Perhaps there is a great value to is, however the style has buried it deep under the ghastly storytelling and has hidden it from me...
July 30, 2011
Practically unreadable.
April 12, 2020
THIS SEEMS LIKE a classic to me, but the question "a classic what?" would be hard to answer.
The first of its two subtitles suggest it is a cultural history, but that would not be an adequate answer. The book does not so much describe as conjure up, recreate, gay male culture between the end of World War II and the worst days of AIDS. But the geographical focus is much more specific than the phrase "an American culture" evokes, since apart from a section on England and a section on Hollywood, the whole book is about New York City--or just Lower Manhattan, really.
So, 1947-85, lower Manhattan, Stonewall and Gay Liberation loom large, no? No. McCourt was at the Stonewall Inn on that famous night, but went home early, and the handful of times he mentions Gay Liberation he sounds skeptical. For instance, McCourt admired and admires Mart Cowley's Boys in the Band, which drew a lot of criticism from more movement-oriented critics:
“This opus he [i.e., McCourt] had found it necessary to defend passionately against virulent accusations in the community ("Ha, ha, hah, Blanche!) of its author's selling out to heterosexual fag bashers by painting a "down" picture of a life they were so very committed to publicizing as happy, joyous, boundless, and free--without so much as a nod either to old Harry Hay or old Leo Lerman or old Tobias Schneebaum or anybody else except that darling old wanker Dennis Pratt, out in full regalia with a television play all about him under the nom de theâtre Quentin Crisp.”
(By the way, the syntactical and referential demands that sentence makes on the reader are typical of the whole book.)
McCourt is not much concerned with being historically thorough. There is a paragraph on post-Stonewall gay men's fiction that does not mention Edmund White; McCourt decides Larry Kramer does really need to be mentioned, but at that point hands the narration over to Robert Weil, as though he would rather just not say anything about the famous AIDS activist and playwright..
In Queer Street, Sontag's "Notes on Camp" is of more moment than Stonewall, the Metropolitan Opera a more crucial institution than Act Up.
McCourt is not uninterested in politics--see his Delancey's Way--but he does seem to resonate more deeply to the gay culture of the old open-secret days, when homosexuality, at least in Lower Manhattan, was hidden in plain sight, as it were: a vital, complex culture that flourished gloriously but was visible only to its participants. I don't suppose he is actually nostalgic for getting arrested or being blackmailed or assaulted, but he does seem to prefer the nuanced to the broad, the indirect to the direct, the coded to the explicit. Style matters.
So, Queer Street is not exactly a history of a culture, or the history of a milieu, since its co-ordinates align almost point-for-point with those of James McCourt's own personal history. The narrative goes to England when McCourt goes to England, to Hollywood when he goes to Hollywood.
For all that, it does not seem like a memoir, either. For one thing, McCourt studiously avoids first person singular pronouns. He refers to himself only as "the author," or as "Queer Temperament," as though he was the milieu's embodiment.
Perhaps Queer Street is like those middle volumes of Á la recherche de temps perdue, Le côté de chez Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe? Those volumes are likewise about a specific scene or milieu at a certain moment in history, but likewise also definitely from the viewpoint of one particular participant observer.
What is not at all like Proust, though, is the heterogeneity of the text, which includes a Browning-esque dramatic monologue in blank verse, essays on Douglas Sirk and Raymond Carver (whom McCourt valued well before those two figures were safely canonical), and an interview with Bette Davis.
Perhaps it is Proustlike in that Queer Street is partly about McCourt's enthusiasm--save that instead of Berma we hear about Holly Woodlawn, instead of Bergotte we hear about Dennis Cooper.
Actually, McCourt is quite a bit more like Joyce than he is like Proust. Impenitently allusive, encyclopedically knowledgeable about all sorts of arcana, with more syntactic resources at his command than any other dozen writers. And Irish. And Catholic.
Actually, maybe it is most like Whittaker Chambers's Witness--? An utterly sui generis American classic about a particular historical milieu at a particular historical juncture, from the point of view of a highly unorthodox intelligence who happens to be a born writer, deeply and regrettably unlikely to find its way onto any course's syllabus.
The first of its two subtitles suggest it is a cultural history, but that would not be an adequate answer. The book does not so much describe as conjure up, recreate, gay male culture between the end of World War II and the worst days of AIDS. But the geographical focus is much more specific than the phrase "an American culture" evokes, since apart from a section on England and a section on Hollywood, the whole book is about New York City--or just Lower Manhattan, really.
So, 1947-85, lower Manhattan, Stonewall and Gay Liberation loom large, no? No. McCourt was at the Stonewall Inn on that famous night, but went home early, and the handful of times he mentions Gay Liberation he sounds skeptical. For instance, McCourt admired and admires Mart Cowley's Boys in the Band, which drew a lot of criticism from more movement-oriented critics:
“This opus he [i.e., McCourt] had found it necessary to defend passionately against virulent accusations in the community ("Ha, ha, hah, Blanche!) of its author's selling out to heterosexual fag bashers by painting a "down" picture of a life they were so very committed to publicizing as happy, joyous, boundless, and free--without so much as a nod either to old Harry Hay or old Leo Lerman or old Tobias Schneebaum or anybody else except that darling old wanker Dennis Pratt, out in full regalia with a television play all about him under the nom de theâtre Quentin Crisp.”
(By the way, the syntactical and referential demands that sentence makes on the reader are typical of the whole book.)
McCourt is not much concerned with being historically thorough. There is a paragraph on post-Stonewall gay men's fiction that does not mention Edmund White; McCourt decides Larry Kramer does really need to be mentioned, but at that point hands the narration over to Robert Weil, as though he would rather just not say anything about the famous AIDS activist and playwright..
In Queer Street, Sontag's "Notes on Camp" is of more moment than Stonewall, the Metropolitan Opera a more crucial institution than Act Up.
McCourt is not uninterested in politics--see his Delancey's Way--but he does seem to resonate more deeply to the gay culture of the old open-secret days, when homosexuality, at least in Lower Manhattan, was hidden in plain sight, as it were: a vital, complex culture that flourished gloriously but was visible only to its participants. I don't suppose he is actually nostalgic for getting arrested or being blackmailed or assaulted, but he does seem to prefer the nuanced to the broad, the indirect to the direct, the coded to the explicit. Style matters.
So, Queer Street is not exactly a history of a culture, or the history of a milieu, since its co-ordinates align almost point-for-point with those of James McCourt's own personal history. The narrative goes to England when McCourt goes to England, to Hollywood when he goes to Hollywood.
For all that, it does not seem like a memoir, either. For one thing, McCourt studiously avoids first person singular pronouns. He refers to himself only as "the author," or as "Queer Temperament," as though he was the milieu's embodiment.
Perhaps Queer Street is like those middle volumes of Á la recherche de temps perdue, Le côté de chez Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe? Those volumes are likewise about a specific scene or milieu at a certain moment in history, but likewise also definitely from the viewpoint of one particular participant observer.
What is not at all like Proust, though, is the heterogeneity of the text, which includes a Browning-esque dramatic monologue in blank verse, essays on Douglas Sirk and Raymond Carver (whom McCourt valued well before those two figures were safely canonical), and an interview with Bette Davis.
Perhaps it is Proustlike in that Queer Street is partly about McCourt's enthusiasm--save that instead of Berma we hear about Holly Woodlawn, instead of Bergotte we hear about Dennis Cooper.
Actually, McCourt is quite a bit more like Joyce than he is like Proust. Impenitently allusive, encyclopedically knowledgeable about all sorts of arcana, with more syntactic resources at his command than any other dozen writers. And Irish. And Catholic.
Actually, maybe it is most like Whittaker Chambers's Witness--? An utterly sui generis American classic about a particular historical milieu at a particular historical juncture, from the point of view of a highly unorthodox intelligence who happens to be a born writer, deeply and regrettably unlikely to find its way onto any course's syllabus.
January 13, 2022
As best I can tell, this entire book was written with the sole purpose of proving the author is more intelligent and ever so much wittier than the reader. Certainly it has little to do with the rise and fall of gay culture in New York City. Most of it consists of ultra-long sentences (and a lot of lists) referencing people you've either heard of, or mostly not...there's no explanation. The reader is "listening" to a showy conversation between people who share a body of inside information that he or she does not, and is treated to the snide little asides and glances that make him or her fully aware of their rube outsider status. What fun!
March 21, 2022
I got 22 pages in and couldn't take it anymore. Loquacious purely for the sake of being loquacious, with little to no exposition on who or what is being referenced. Erratic and inconclusive in reference. His knowledge is extensive, but if the author can't abridge it and state it plainly to those who - mainly - would have no prior insight, then the author needs to adjust how they address their audience. I was so looking forward to this book, too. Maybe I'll press on in bits and pieces. It pains me to say I found it disappointing because the subject is terribly important and this could have been something truly great.
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November 17, 2023306.76 MCC
June 8, 2020
I want the kind of shitty hot relationship my straight peers manage.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews